💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › johann-kaspar-we-demand-nothing.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:23:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: We Demand Nothing Author: Johann Kaspar Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: anarchism, anarchy, attack, insurrection Source: Retrieved on September 14, 2010 from http://libcom.org/library/we-demand-nothing Notes: Published in ‘Fire to the Prisons’ (Issue 7), Autumn 2009.
“I do not demand any right, therefore I need not recognize any either.”
— M. Stirner
On the night of August 8^(th), 2009, hundreds of inmates at the
California Institution for Men in Chino rioted for 11 hours, causing
“significant and extensive” damage to the medium-security prison. Two
hundred and fifty prisoners were injured, with fifty-five admitted to
the hospital.
On Mayday 2009, three blocks of San Francisco’s luxury shopping district
were wrecked by a roving mob, leaving glass strewn throughout the
sidewalk for the shopkeepers, police and journalists to gawk at the next
morning.
On the early morning of April 10^(th), 2009, nineteen individuals took
over and locked down an empty university building the size of a
city-block on 5^(th) avenue in Manhattan, draping banners and reading
communiqués off the roof. Police and university officials responded by
sending helicopters, swat teams, and hundreds of officers to break in
and arrest them all.
After Oscar Grant, an unarmed black man, was killed by transit authority
officers in Oakland, California on New Years Day 2009, a march of about
250 people turned wild when a multiculturalist’s dream focus group
rampaged through downtown, causing over $200,000 in damage while
breaking shop windows, burning cars, setting trash bins on fire, and
throwing bottles at police officers. Police arrested over 100.
From December 6^(th), 2008 to Christmas, a rebellion swept Greece after
the police shooting of a 16 year old boy in Athens. Hundreds of
thousands of people took part, collectively ripping up the streets,
firebombing police stations, looting stores, occupying universities and
union buildings, all the while confronting cops on a daily basis with an
intensity and coordination worthy of an army.
After the “accidental” deaths of two kids who were being chased by
police in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, on Oct 27^(th), 2005,
youths in the French banlieues burned thousands of cars, smashed
hundreds of buildings, and destroyed shops large and small every day for
three weeks in response. 8,973 cars burned all over France those nights,
and 2,888 were arrested.
What unites these disparate events of the last few years? Neither the
race nor class backgrounds of the participants, neither their political
contexts nor social conditions, neither their locations nor their
targets. Rather, it is a certain absence that unites them, a gap in the
center of all these conflicts: the lack of demands. Looking to
understand, manage, or explain the aforementioned events to an alienated
public, prison officials claim ignorance, journalists scavenge for a
“cause,” politicians seek something to negotiate, while liberals impose
their own ideology. The fear is that there really is nothing beneath the
actions, no complaint, no reason, no cause, just a wild release of
primal energy, as inexplicable and irrational as a sacrifice to the gods
themselves. At all costs, there must be meaning, they cry, some kind of
handle to grab onto, something, anything. What do they want? everyone
asks, and the reply is everywhere the same: Nothing.
From Chino to Paris, Australia to Athens, New York to San Francisco,
these are only a sample of revolts worldwide that have increasingly
given up on the desire to “demand something.” To the bourgeois press,
the lack of demands is conceived of as a symptom of irrationality, a
certain madness or pathology that plagues the disenfranchised. To the
radical left, the absence of demands is seen as political immaturity, a
naïve rage that can only exhaust itself in short bursts. But to those
who’ve shared such deeds together, to those who’ve seen their demands
become the means of their own suffocation, such a trend is a welcome
sign of things to come.
Perhaps it’s time we stop seeing these struggles as “lacking” something,
but rather as determinate acts of negation with their own particular
force, meaning, and history. To take seriously the content of struggles
without demands, one must see them not as isolated events, but as
moments within a history of developing antagonistic relations between
capital and the life it subsumes. What are the forms in which struggles
without demands appear to us? As riots mostly, but also as wild strikes,
endless occupations, violent rebellions, popular uprisings and general
insurrections. Instead of seeing a riot as sociologists do, namely as
any collective act of violence which seeks to directly communicate its
message without respect to legal norms, we can see them as they appear
to us: as developing forms of struggle adequate to the conditions of
exploitation at their particular time. Riots usually start with some
grievance, sometimes with a demand in sight. A riot can also start with
no demand, but end with one. Other times, riots begin with a particular
demand, but end without any care whatsoever for its accomplishment.
Sometimes demands are forced onto a collectivity of rioters by a
self-appointed “representative” and other times demands are decided on
by the collectivity themselves. Every aforementioned case has occurred
in American history, and it is the task of the insurrectionary scientist
to uncover any possible logics to the historical development of such
relations in the dialectic between demand and destruction. As the
conditions of exploitation develop, so do the struggles against them,
and with this the meaning of the struggles themselves change, expressed
not by demands but by the content of the activity itself. It is this
activity we investigate below.
What is a demand? Etymologically, it is a giving of one’s hand, an
order. In the context here, the demand is a contract, the guaranteed
expiration date of one’s struggle, the conditions for its conclusion.
“If x is achieved, action y will end” is what the demand says. But this
is obviously a trick, for a contract assumes two equal sides, two
abstract individuals or entities exchanging the dates of their
expiration of hostilities based on a mutual recognition of conditions.
If the vote is the political equivalent to money, then the demand is the
political equivalent to credit cards. It is faith, a contract, a
password to get something when one has nothing. It can be used by
anyone, thieves and king, rich and poor, just and unjust; its function
is the same, to lock one in deeper to the structure of capital.
Why do struggles with demands tend to get wilder, and struggles without
them tend to proliferate? On the one hand, the ability of the state or
capital to satisfy minimal demands is being eroded. In a hyperglobalized
economy, worker’s don’t need to be guaranteed to socially reproduce
themselves as workers where they are, for all that capital requires is
some worker, anywhere, to do the job. Wage-demands and demands to
maintain work hit up against the brick wall of the law of value.
Proletarians realize this and respond, now threatening to blow up their
factory (at New Fabris in Paris, for example), kidnapping bosses (at
Scapa in France), and striking not for improving conditions, better
wages or even keeping their jobs, but for money, just more money when
they sell the factory. No illusion anymore, they seem to be saying we
are nothing, we have nothing, we demand nothing except some paltry means
to soften our fall. The limits of demands reveal the limits of class
struggle, which can either mean the opening to its overcoming through
broadened social struggle — insurrection, social war — , or the closure
of struggle all together. We bet on the former.
Although the possibility to satisfy demands is becoming harder, demands
are still made, perhaps out of habit, or desperation. The demand is only
able to reproduce capital, since we have been emptied of all content
besides the content of capital: when we eat, drink, walk, kiss, fuck,
fight, or learn for ourselves, it is not for ourselves but for needs and
desires set by the laws of economy to produce value. Alien to ourselves,
we are at home in capital. We don’t even know our needs, and yet we
still hold banners crying for their fulfillment. Our only genuine need
can be to liberate need from its submission to capital. Until that
occurs, our needs will continue to be nothing more than a means for the
purpose of reproducing wealth, and demands are simply the respite, the
handle in which our needs can be grabbed, reproduced, reconfigured, and
reasserted.
Without a particular demand, no mediation can be made to pacify them, no
politics are possible to manage the dispute; “not” having a demand is
not a lack of anything, but a contradictory assertion of one’s power and
one’s weakness. Too weak to even try and get something from those who
dominate proletarian life, and simultaneously strong enough to try and
accomplish the direct appropriation of one’s life, time, and activity
apart from mediation. A demandless struggle, whether we call it riot or
rebellion, insurrection or civil war, reveals the totality of the enemy
one fights (capital-as-society) and the totality of those who fight it
(the potentiality of non-alienated life). In such struggles, the
proletariat “lays claims to no particular right because the wrong it
suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.” (Marx). This
“general wrong” is the generalized structure of exploitation at the
heart of the capitalist system — the forced selling of one’s time and
life activity to someone else in return for a wage — which can never be
overcome by any particular change, only by a total one.
As particular demands transform themselves throughout American history —
from wage-demands to social demands to political demands to
environmental ones — the potential refusal of demands haunts the
bourgeoisie. This is obvious to anyone who takes the levels of class
violence employed by the exploited as rational forms of contending with
an objective structure of domination. What is not so obvious is the ways
in which this refusal manifests itself in differing forms of property
destruction, expropriation, and arson. Only history can show this.
The New York City Draft Riots of 1863, the bloodiest riot in American
history (120 killed at least, 2,000 injured, 50 buildings burned),
contains all the contradictions and elements that were to develop and
separate out into their own forms throughout the next century: political
demands (no draft, no war), class attacks (property destruction, arson,
looting), and race war (physical assaults, killing). Between the Draft
Riots and the Oscar Grant riots, we notice three broad trends that
emerge in relation to the content of insurrectionary activity and the
form it takes as “demand.”
Broadly speaking, we can separate three main historical periods of
rioting in relation to their issues or form, and two historical styles
in relation to their methods or content. The struggle between labor and
capital between 1877 and 1934, the conflicts over race between 1935 and
1968, and the student and anti-war actions of the 60’s and 70’s are the
three broad traditions that congealed into the modern protest of our
time. The women’s, gay liberation and anti-nuke actions of the 70’s and
80’s and the revival of riots over race relations in Miami and New York
City in the ‘80s continued the dual legacy of 60’s style riots in its
two different forms. It is not until the Rodney King riots in LA (and
elsewhere) of 1992 that a new phase of revolt begins, one which we are
still within today.
From 1877–1934, labor struggles in America took on levels of violence
unseen before or since. In that period, demands were made over wages,
working conditions, and the length of the working day, but once these
basic demands were outlined in the 1860’s, almost nothing new emerged.
From then on the level of class struggle escalated while the demands
become less and less important. Rail strikes immediately turned into
riots, spreading nationally along the railway, leaving thousand of train
cars destroyed, dead bodies on both sides, and thousands injured. Coal
miners blew up their own mines, and factory workers killed Pinkertons
outside their gates.
Property destruction was widespread, but its focus and meaning were
different then they are today. First of all, the property attacked by
workers’ was their own tools and products of labor, that is, the means
of production they were using to create new value for their employer. By
destroying their own instruments of production — rail lines, coal mines,
factory machines — they were destroying the unity of the capitalist
production process, not merely its appearance as commodity in the realm
of circulation and consumption. Second, although the machines, rails,
train cars, trolleys, mines, and factories that different workers
destroyed were under the legal ownership of the capitalist who employed
them, they were seen by the workers as their own property. This is
because the machines were the product and means of their labor, their
physical and mental exertion. The attack on this property was not merely
an attack against capitalists, but against that which makes them
proletarians: work, tools, value. The self-abolition of the proletariat
was not expressed formally in any one of their demands, but posed
materially in the actions and targets themselves.
From Harlem 1935 to Washington D.C. 1968, class struggles took the form
of appearance of “race relations” and “ghetto riots.” Qualitatively
different than the Jim Crow anti-black, and anti-immigrant riots,[1]
these struggles were dominated by proletarian and subproletarian black
assaults on the foundations of white, bourgeois society: police, stores,
banks, buildings, cars. Looting and arson were the principle methods
used to critique such elements. The looting that occurred in Harlem ’35,
’43, and then in Watts, Newark and Detroit of the mid-60’s, was not the
looting of people’s houses, such as the looting of capitalist houses
during the Draft riots of 1863, but rather it was the looting of shops
and stores, the places at which the products people make are sold back
to them for prices they can’t afford. In other words, the looting was
social, not personal. It was the critique of a society which depends on
people accumulating shit they don’t need and desiring shit they make but
can’t have.
Arson is nothing new in the history of American class violence (English
laborers burned machinery threatening their jobs in the 18^(th)
century), but it thoroughly shocked the bourgeoisie when blacks started
burning down their own neighborhoods. Why? What was so new about the
fire this time? Perhaps it was the change in the nature of this property
destruction, a change markedly different than that of the previous era
of riots. Yes, people were burning and destroying all the property
around them, but it wasn’t their property. It was owned by someone
outside the ghetto. As opposed to the previous rail, coal, streetcar,
and factory workers’ destruction of what they deemed their own property
(although technically it was owned by the capitalist), these folks knew
it wasn’t their property, and were happy to get rid of it. Even if it
means sabotaging their own means of existence, such as access to food,
shelter, and transportation. For the practical rejection of capital
entails the abolition of one’s previous mode of life, and this
self-negation always appears as suicidal. But it is only suicidal from
the standpoint of capital, not from the perspective of human beings
actively creating their lives for the first time.
Between June 1963 and May 1968, there were 239 separate urban riots
involving at least 200,000 participants, which led to 8,000 injuries and
190 deaths. On April 4^(th) 1968 alone, after MLK Jr’s death, 125 cities
across 28 states rioted, leading to 47 deaths. In Washington D.C., riots
broke out 10 blocks from the White House. In the same period, at least
50,000 people were arrested. The riots in Watts, Newark, and Detroit
alone accounted for 1/6^(th) of all the arrests. Although 190 deaths is
still a lot, it is nothing in comparison to the amount of deaths that
occurred regularly during the more formal battles between capital and
labor. The killings were mostly committed by the police and military,
not rioters. In Watts, 28 out of 34 killed were black; Newark, 24 out of
26 were black; Detroit, 36 out of 43 killed were black.
As ghetto-riots proliferated across urban America, another form of
protest was emerging, the student, youth, anti-war, left radical
protest. The sites of struggle shift to universities, draft centers, and
political conventions. During these struggles, demands rose and fell
constantly, from ending the draft to “free love”, from peace to “bring
the war home.” What unites the separate, contradictory, even superficial
demands are the actions themselves of those who were demanding. These
actions included mostly sit-ins and occupations, some property
destruction and arson, lots of police confrontation, and little to no
physical assaults on civilians. In Berkeley ’64, during the “free speech
movement”, 1000 people occupied Sproul Hall for 32 hours, ending in the
peaceful arrest of 773. In 1966, with the draft enacted, campuses
revolted en masse. Students occupied the University of Chicago
administration for 4 days, and riots occurred at ROTC centers at
University of Wisconsin, CCNY, and Oberlin.
In Oct of 1967, a national month of protest was called, in which some
occupations, some symbolic acts, and some confrontations arose. On Oct
18^(th), about 1000 people fought police in Wisconsin with 70 students
injured, and several buildings damaged. On Oct 19^(th), Brooklyn
College’s Boylan Hall was occupied, and in Chicago, 18 were arrested
breaking into a draft induction center. On Oct 20^(th), 10,000 Berkeley
and Oakland activists blocked the streets around a draft induction
center, slashing tires, dropping nails, writing graffiti, and fighting
with about 1000 police for hours. On Oct 21^(st) and 22^(nd), a mass,
ritualized, “nonviolent” anti-war rally took place in DC with 150,000
people. Some broke the rules and fought police, ending with 681
protestors arrested, and 13 marshals, 10 soldiers, and 24 demonstrators
wounded.
After six days of an occupation at Columbia University, students fought
police on April 29^(th), 1968, ending with 132 students, 4 faculty and
12 police injuries. That year at the DNC in Chicago, Yippies tried to
inaugurate a riot, and between Aug 25^(th) and Aug 30^(th), they did.
192 police injuries, 81 police vehicles damaged, 24 windshields smashed,
17 cars dented, and numerous shop windows broken as well. In March and
April of 1969, black students at SUNY Buffalo, Harvard, and Cornell
occupied central buildings. In May, students were killed in police
confrontations in Berkeley and Greensboro. In October, the Weathermen
launched their “Days of Rage”, in which 300 of them destroyed property
and fought police together. Six weathermen were shot, most were beaten,
250 arrested. In Santa Barbara, on Feb 25^(th), 1970, UCSB students
burned a Bank of America branch to the ground, and on April 18^(th),
1970, a student there was slain by a stray bullet from police. But it
wasn’t until National Guardsmen killed 4 students on May 4^(th), 1970 at
Kent State University that the country erupted in rage against
casualties at protests.
The pattern of student and anti-war demonstrations follows the trends of
its time: limited attacks on property, police escalation, sit-ins and
occupations. As students and youth became more and more indiscriminate
with their site of struggles, as they become more violent in their
tactics and less accommodating in their resolve, their grievances
progressed from a rejection of war and imperialism to a critique of
everyday life and capitalism. What started with a strategy of demands
and escalation ended with a rejection of anything less than revolution.
The three main contentions of violent struggles — labor, race, and war —
all exhibited some minimal demands. In the first case, higher wages,
better working conditions, and a shorter working day. In the second,
equal political rights, treatment, and benefits in all economic and
social spheres. And in the third case, an end to the War in Vietnam and
a stopping of the Draft. Within such a demand schema, it’s easy to
reduce all antagonistic phenomena of those periods to a certain
structure: exploited group X demands Y from institution Z. For example,
one can see the Rail strike of 1877, the Harlem riot of 1935, and the
university rebellions of May 1970 as equal forms of collective
bargaining, which despite their illegal means, are geared towards legal
ends.
What falls out in such an equation is the very content of the actions
themselves, actions which go against their very ends, in turn
overflowing their political forms and becoming social. What occurs in
these riots, how do they begin, and end?
The rail strike of 1877 is one of the most violent in American history.
After wages were cut on July 1^(st), rail workers went on strike in
Baltimore, Ohio, and West Virginia. On July 20, the army attacked the
strikers, ending with 10 killed. The strike spread to New York, Newark,
and Pittsburgh. The Philadelphia army attacked the Pittsburgh strikers,
and the strikers attacked back, leaving 24 dead. In the end, 5 million
dollars of Pennsylvania Railroad property was destroyed, including 104
locomotives, and 2152 railroad cars. 3000 federal troops and thousands
more militia came to restore peace. Riots broke out in Altoona, Reading,
Harrisburg, Scranton, Philadelphia, before moving to Chicago, St. Louis,
San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Not organized by any union, the
strike spread along the rail lines themselves, with workers in various
occupations joining in where they could. All that over a wage increase?
The Harlem riot of 1935 prefigures the race riots of the 60’s. A black
boy was caught shoplifting by white cops, and a minor confrontation
occurred. Rumors spread that the police killed him (they didn’t), and
Harlemites sought vengeance. In two days of rioting, over 200 white
owned stores were demolished, causing 2 million dollars in property
damage. This pattern was to repeat itself over and over and over again
in the next 70 years. Can one really label the riots that happen in
response part of a demand for equal rights?
In May 1970, the wave of student anti-war actions in the 60’s culminated
after the shooting of 4 students at a Kent State University protest. In
response, 1350 universities exploded in riots, including 4,350,000
participants. 400 schools shut down. Police opened fire at Jackson State
College on May 14^(th) — killing 2 black students — and again in
Lawrence, Kansas on July, killing 2 youths, sparking a wave of arson and
property destruction in response. All that just to stop a war thousands
of miles away?
We think not. Rather, such demands are merely screens to interface
between worlds of rage and worlds of law, a force of the subjective
discontent of life under capital against a force of the objective
necessity of capital subsuming life. Incommensurable in their content,
they are equalized and understood from the perspective of one side, that
of law, as attempts to collectively express a will towards a particular
change in law. They are not understood from the side of the practices
themselves, perhaps not even by those committing them. As goals, demands
do not determine the type of struggles, actions, or events that we
describe here. For every demand mentioned above can also be sought after
by legal means. What makes these activities unique is the continually
developing contradiction between their form and content, the form as the
demand to someone for something, and the content as rejecting anyone’s
attempt to accommodate anything.
The pace in which institutions of state and capital accommodate the
demands of these struggles accelerates rapidly. When a struggle’s demand
is accommodated, the struggle quickly shifts from an external conflict
between two opposed players to an internal conflict managed by one
institution. The first major accommodation of demands took sixty years
of riots (1877–1934), when in the 1930’s government and capitalists
acquiesced to the assaults of proletarian violence by bettering work
conditions all around.
The second major accommodation took thirty years of riots (1935–1968),
when, after multiple cities were ravaged by minor insurrections of
mostly black proletarians, government in the late 60’s made new
legislation to enforce equality in schools, employment and public
institutions. “Race riots”[2] of course existed before the Harlem
uprising of 1935 (and continued after the massive riots following MLK
Jr.’s assassination in April ’68), but its modern character took form
then, insofar as the riots were initiated by black folks as a response
to a particular act of police violence (usually an arrest, beating,
murder, or rumor of murder), instead of initiated by white folks as an
attack on black and immigrant communities who then defend themselves
(the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906, for instance). Hence, targets in the
modern race riot are property, police, and stores, and acts of physical
assault between white and black civilians and/or immigrants, such as
occurred in the Jim Crow era (1890–1914), are much less common, although
still present.
Finally, the third major accommodation of demands took about ten years
of riots (1964–1972), after students, youth, and left radicals of all
stripes occupied, smashed, burned, and fought cops at thousands of
Universities across the country. Shortly after the national riots
following the Kent State massacre on May 4^(th) 1970, the government
began to incorporate anti-war dissidents into their debates, ultimately
conceding to their demands by abolishing the draft in 1973, and pulling
out of Vietnam completely by 1975.
Since the anti-war protests of the 60’s, the women’s liberation, gay
liberation, Native American, anti-nuke, and anti-apartheid movements
have gone through similar rapidly accelerating phases of riot — protest
— accommodation — reorganization. Some of these struggles never end, but
once their particular demands are incorporated into a general
institutional structure in some form or another, the movement changes
nature from one of opposition to one of competition. The pace has
accelerated so much recently that the dialectic between destruction,
demand, accommodation and neutralization occurs within less and less
time from after the first riot. With the American wing of the
anti-globalization movement kicking off in Seattle ’99, it took less
than a decade, as the IMF, World Bank and WTO all but collapsed or had
to completely reorganize their language and agenda to integrate the
force of global assaults and physical critiques they received. With the
immigrant protests of May ’06, it took less than a year, as politicians
quickly reorganized their agenda to pass new laws (or rather, to make
laws that never pass). With the Oakland riots of January ’09, it took a
week.
When one focuses on the presence or absence of demands as the criteria
for discerning revolutionary from reformist struggle, one ignores the
relations and meanings internal to the activities of the struggles
themselves. Demands are getting accommodated quicker, but revolution is
in no way closer now than ever before.
The two grand styles of American counter-violence are the generalized
riot and the specialized tactic. The core elements of the former are
looting, arson, property damage and physical assault; its participants
are proletarians and subproletarians. The elements of the latter are
picket lines, marches, sit-ins and traffic blockades; its participants
are usually a minority group trained in such measures.
Prior to the 1930’s, these two forms of activity were indistinguishable
in the main conflict of the era, that between capital and labor, in
which strikes were also riots, marches were battles, and sit-ins and
blockades were nothing but the defense and creation of barricades. After
sixty years of intense class war (1877–1934), in which each strike left
bodies on both sides, changes in both tactics and strategy were adopted,
changes that reflected shifts in the relation between capital and
proletariat, and between the state and its subjects.
In 1934, the United States was on the brink of anarchy. Wild, bloody
strikes swept through Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco. On May
21^(st) and 22^(nd), Minneapolis truckers on strike stopped all
deliveries, and in response, police and a newly formed “citizens
alliance” attacked them. Truckers beat police and the “alliance”,
wounding 67. On May 23^(rd) and 24^(th), six thousand auto workers on
strike in Toledo fought police, the company security and the National
Guard, eventually forcing them all to retreat, but not before two
strikers were killed. On May 9^(th), longshoremen all along the West
Coast went on a massive strike, but it wasn’t until July 3^(rd) in San
Francisco that violent confrontations between police and proletarians
emerged. The generalized strike peaked when police killed two on “Bloody
Thursday,” wounding 115 as well.
With the depression raging, workers turning to more and more desperate
methods of destruction[3], and police, Pinkertons, and national
guardsmen racking up casualties daily, the state as well as many larger
capitalists began to concede, allowing the formation of unions in
certain industries, guaranteeing lesser hours and better conditions, and
even a minimum wage. At the same time, workers methods began to move
away from generalized rampage and towards the Sit-Down, the model act of
symbolic revolt whose creation shifted American conflict from riot to
ritual. In 1936, there were 48 factory sit-downs involving 87,817
workers, 477 in 1937 involving 398,117 workers, and 52 in 1938 involving
28,749 workers. These sit-downs were intentionally non-provocative, yet
they would defend themselves if attacked or prevented. This in fact
occurred in Flint, Michigan, January 1937, when guards stopped union men
from delivering food to their striking comrades inside the GM factory.
In response, workers locked the guards in a washroom, police fired tear
gas at the workers, and workers sent the tear gas back. After 14
injuries, the officers withdrew in what’s known joyfully as the “Battle
of Running Bulls.”
In the 30’s, as capitalists and government accommodated labor’s minimal
demands, proletarian revolt shifted to specialized tactics, and
capitalism began its turn towards complete, regulated commodity
production of all goods and activities constituting daily life for not
only the bourgeoisie, but the working-class as well. In the 30’s, the
separation of demand from destruction was enacted for the first time. As
specialization became the norm in the workplace, so it was in the
struggle as well. This separation set the stage for the forms of
ritualized rebellion that carried the civil rights movement from
1955–1965 with the lunch counter sit-ins, as well as the student
anti-war actions of 1964–1972 with their sit-ins, occupations and
traffic blockades. The refinement of such tactics developed rapidly in
the ecological struggles of the 70’s and 80’s over nuclear power, old
growth forests, water, pollution, and coal. Three main groups
accomplished this: the Clamshell Alliance of New England, the Abalone
Alliance of the West Coast, and the Livermore Action Group.
In August 1976, the Clamshell Alliance occupied Seabrook nuclear
construction site, twice. The first ending in 18 arrests, the second
with 180. After almost a year of trainings and preparation, in April
1977, the Clamshell Alliance went back with 2400 people, ending with
1400 being arrested. No violence was committed. Inspired by the
Clamshell Alliance, the Abalone Alliance on the West Coast tried to
occupy the Diablo plant in August of ’77. It didn’t work, but four years
later in 1981 they returned, occupying the site for two weeks, blocking
the plant, ending with 1900 arrests. On Mother Day 1982, the Livermore
Action Group shut down the production of nuclear weapons at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory outside San Francisco when women armed
with teddy bears sat down in front of traffic, as four women chained
themselves to the gate. In March 1983, the group hiked through backwoods
to occupy Vanderberg Air Force Base before 777 of them were arrested.
These three groups, along with the countless other environmental groups
to emerge in the 80’s, formalized the already specialized tactics of the
30’s labor sit-downs, 50’s and 60’s civil rights sit-ins, and 70’s
student occupations into a science, with its own jargon, methods,
principles, and values. Rebaptizing riots as “nonviolent direct action”,
mobs with grievances to avenge now became “protestors” with “rights” to
“express.” The peaceful arrest was the ultimate end point, the lock-down
became central, and pacifism dominated the ethical norm. Both government
and protestors finally had a common language to speak, a shared
framework with rules and boundaries to act within. Earth and Animal
Liberation movements of the 90’s and 00’s took the same structure —
formalized actions — yet inverted the elements: from public to
clandestine, lock-down to escape, pacifism to arson.
The Rodney King riots of 1992 in Los Angeles (and San Diego, San
Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Atlanta,
Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix,
St. Louis, Washington DC, and Toronto) explodes this logic of
separation. Without specialization, these contagious events seemed to
herald the return of the “race riot”, physical assault, generalized
looting, arson and mass property destruction. Yet none of these forms
really ended in the 60’s, they just became more and more separated from
general social upheaval, pushed into “special interest” boxes. There
were dozens of so-called race riots from 1970–1992. On the one hand, the
pre-civil rights style race wars were resurrected by KKK/neo-nazi/white
racist types against black and brown folks, especially between 1976 and
1979 in the South: Boston Bussing attacks between 1974–1976, KKK clashes
in Columbus, Ohio and Mobile, Alabama in ’77, Neo-Nazi battles in San
Jose, CA and St. Louis, Missouri in October 1977 and March 1978
respectively, and the infamous Greensboro massacre of Nov 3^(rd), 1970
when the Klan and Neo-Nazi party killed 4 protestors in the Communist
Workers Party organized march. On the other hand, the ghetto riot of the
60’s resurfaced numerous times: Elizabeth, New Jersey 1975, Miami 1980,
’82, ’84 and ’89, Howard’s Beach, Queens 1986, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
1989, Washington DC 1991, Brooklyn 1991, Manhattan 1992.
All have a similar story: a policeman or white racist shoots someone —
Black, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Korean, Vietnamese — and the
ethnic or racial community to which that person belong responds through
immediate arson, property destruction, and looting. After four policemen
charged with shooting an unarmed black man were acquitted by an all
white Tampa jury, Miami was covered in blood and smoke for three days
from May 17^(th) to 19^(th), 1980. Three white folks were beaten to
death, while police and National Guardsmen killed eleven black folks.
3600 National Guard were called in to help, and 1000 blacks were
arrested. In July of 1992, a policeman shot an unarmed Dominican man in
New York City, and 1000 people responded in force by overturning cars,
smashing windows, littering the streets, burning three building and
blocking traffic on the GW bridge. The Howards Beach, Bensonhurst and
Brooklyn riots start a little differently, with white youth
intentionally killing black youth, and a Hasidic Jew unintentionally
running over a West Indian man. In all cases, the race war form of riot
reemerged, with direct assaults between whites and blacks, Hasids and
West Indians, Koreans and African-Americans.
And what about the blackout riots of ’77 in NYC, the Detroit devils
nights, the Tompkins Square Park Riots of ’88, the Chicago Bulls riots,
not to mention all the sports riots in Michigan, Milwaukee, and
Pittsburgh? All of this goes to show that the form of generalized
rioting characteristic of “race riots” never disappeared, but constantly
reasserted itself from the 70’s-90’s, albeit in much more isolated,
fragmented, and partial ways. It was not until Los Angeles of ’92 that
generalized rioting become cohesive again within a national and social
atmosphere of refusal, which allowed for the rebellion to transcend the
previous limits of conflict, that is, the limit of demands.
Between 1877 and 1934, proletarians (mostly white and immigrant) sought
to attack capital directly (their boss, factory, means of production)
but were constantly mediated and blocked by different state sanctioned
agencies of legitimate violence (police, Pinkertons, national guard,
army). In other words, workers wanting to destroy capitalists fought
police in their place. Between 1934 and 1968, a new situation arises.
Subproletarians and proletarians (mostly black), sought to attack the
state directly (as police) but were constantly mediated by capital (as
property). In other words, blacks wanting to fight police accomplished
it by means of property destruction instead of direct confrontation
(with exceptions). In the first case, the state mediates the
antagonistic relation between capital and labor; in the second case,
capital mediates the antagonistic relation between the state and labor.
The student and anti-war actions signify the attempt to attack the state
and capital together, but mediating it through the structure which
prepares the transition to selling oneself as labor: the University. In
other words, the crucible of future labor becomes a site of struggle,
which is then further policed.
Now, from 1970–1992, the nonviolent direct action trend solidifies and
isolated race riots continue to occur. Both are mediated by their own
limits: the first is that their own bodies become the means by which
they engage in conflict, and in the second is that the conflict only
emerges in relation to an act of racist violence from police or others.
From 1992 to the present, property destruction reemerges, but
differently than before. On the one hand as specialized (political
riots) and on the other as generalized (‘race riots’). But both of these
tend to blur during the dotcom and housing bubble eras of the 90’s and
’00s. In Miami, LA, Seattle, Cincinnati, Michigan and Oakland, the
target is once again capital, but now the attempt to negate it is
mediated by capital itself in one of its forms, property. To destroy
capital as such, capital as property is attacked (as opposed to capital
as commodities, money, or labor). The state mediates this when it can
(defending summits, sending in the National Guard), but it also retreats
a bit, leaving capital to take care of itself. That is, the bait of
property destruction lures individuals into isolated illegal activity
which capital can recover from while the state can make examples out of
those it captures.
As demands progressed from specific issues to general refusal, rioting
regressed from a geneneralized activity to a specialized practice. Since
the civil war, the nature of demands has transformed from localized to
total within the content of particular struggles themselves. Revolts
over work — from the massive rail strike of 1877, through the Pullman
and Homestead riots of the 1880’s and 90s, to the Battle of Blair
Mountain in the 1920s — revolts over racial exploitation — from the
Harlem riots of 1935 to the MLK Jr. riots of 1968 — and revolts over war
— from the Free Speech movement of 64 through the Days of Rage in 69 —
all end on the brink of civil war. Once that possibility is breached,
demands — whether real or not — are brought in to adjudicate,
accommodate and pacify the populace. It is no coincidence that an
American situationist group from Berkeley in 1972 called “For Ourselves”
could write a theoretical statement with the subtitle, “On the Practical
Necessity of Demanding Everything.” That framework was finally shattered
in the Los Angeles rebellion of ’92 when it was realized that there is
no longer anyone to “demand everything” from. As “For Ourselves” was
theorizing the content of the last decade of revolts as the necessity of
demanding everything without regard to any specific practice, the
Clamshell alliance was theorizing the content of the last decades of
civil disobedience as the necessity of demanding something by means of
very particular “nonviolent direct action” techniques.
Besides modern race-class riots, the anti-globalization movement has
inherited this dual legacy, leading to the contradictory movement of
those who demand everything (as they continue the legacy of the
Sit-downs of the 30’s) working side-by-side with those who demand
nothing (as they continue the legacy of class violence in the early
20^(th) century and the ghetto riots of the 60’s). The difference is
that such generalized violence is now also done by specialists, black
block anarchists, and the specialized tactics of non-violent direct
action have become more and more accepted as the general means for
engaging in social conflict. The generalization of demands and the
specialization of practice leads us to the impasse of the present, which
cannot be overcome without breaking with the forms and content of revolt
as we inherit them, with and without demands.
Struggles with insurrectionary content in the United States have
progressed from demanding something (1880s-1940s), through demanding
everything (1960’s-1970’s) to demanding nothing (1992-present). Each new
phase is marked by the lasting contradictions of the previous one,
insofar as no period is completely “new,” rather it only makes separate
and dominant a certain tendency hitherto indistinct in the previous mode
of struggle. When uprisings in Philadelphia ’64, Rochester ’64, Watts
’65, Newark ’67, Detroit ’67, Buffalo ’67, everywhere ’68, Berkeley ’69,
Chicago ’69 and hundreds of others cities demand a change in the
totality of existing conditions, they are only theorizing the
implications of the generalized strikes and riots of proletarians in the
last decades of the 19^(th) century and the first decades of the
20^(th). When rioters in LA ’92, St. Petersburg ’96, Seattle ’99,
Cincinnati ’01, Toledo ’03, Benton Harbor ’05, New Orleans ’05, St. Paul
’08 or Oakland ’09 during the last two decades act with the intensity
and coordination of 60s rioters, but without the general national
atmosphere of rebellion, and without wanting anything at all from their
targets and enemies, then they are only conceptualizing in deed the
concrete failure of every institutional attempt to “change everything.”
Against abstract demand, even the demand to end all demands, they are
acting on the basis of a concrete rejection of demands as such. This
practical shift relocates the power to make history from those who
reconcile conflicts to those who make them irreconcilable. The present
comprehension of history is enacted in the forms through which struggles
take place today, and those forms are dominated by a demandless
consistency of social acts of violence against capital in all its
manifestations.
What are the ethics of demandless struggles? They are not based on a
desired object or end, they can’t be judged based on calculation or
utilitarian value. Rather, their strength comes from their basis in the
act itself, the deed irrespective of calculation, interest, or gain; it
is the privileging of the activity over the product. The danger with
this anti-moralist ethic of pure action is that it can easily cross
boundaries of disciplined violence, such as in the Draft Riot of 1863
when class revolt turned to race war. So how can one overcome this
danger? By maintaining principles of friendship and trust, to ground the
anarchy of pure action in the commune of shared needs. But what grounds
the commune? Action, and its legacy. The history of acts is the only
“product” created — a narrative of a whole, directed, consistent life.
A struggle without demands is a strike at the level of language. By
refusing the accepted form of presenting disagreements, the meaning and
justification of the action becomes internal to its presentation. But
not as immediately “symbolic” or “gestural”, rather it is mediated by
all those things which make up alienated life: commodities, property,
police, money, labor. The critique of existing society becomes not a
verbal cry for a better world but a mute rejection of the entirety of
this one, only recognized by the cohesive movement and relation of acts
of practical negation of all those dominant mediations making up one’s
nonlife. After a battle in the social war subsides, only the ruins left
behind can tell its story.
The refusal to demand allows for the abstraction of capital to reveal
itself, no longer covered up in the mysticism of word-games, i.e., we
are fighting for right x because of need y based on condition z. That
structure will never challenge the basis of the needs and conditions
themselves. The undemanding struggle is not for anything, it is a
position, a stance, a risk to become a subject of one’s own activity;
until then, we are nothing but objects of capital, things moved around
to work, vote, and reproduce. Capital is personified in our actions
(work, consume, repeat), and the state is personified in our words
(rights, justice, freedom). To refuse both personifications means to
destroy the form of Man which capital and state need for their reality,
that form is the proletariat and the citizen, the worker and the
activist, the entrepreneur and the poet. The complete negation of Man as
he exists under any and every category granted by class society is the
ultimate goal of communism, and this cannot be demanded. It can only be
accomplished.
The demand is a tool for self-organization. It unifies separated
individuals against a common enemy toward a common good. It is the
unification of the exploited based upon a common enunciation, “We want
X”. The demand becomes a self-mediation, a self-constitution of the
undifferentiated masses into a singular one, a subject who demands.
Demands, in others words, are processes of subjectification. Individuals
act as class, and in that class action they become subjects and no
longer merely objects of capital.
The problem is that the class of those exploited by a common structure
of domination is unified on the very basis of that domination, on the
very basis of the capitalist relation. All the diverse appearances of
one’s fragmented life cohere around a unified essence — the identity of
the exploited as worker, as student, as oppressed. This identity is
crafted in struggle, and becomes the basis for a community. The
community can outlast the struggle for a particular demand, or not. The
difference and diversity of those living under capital is not the issue,
rather it’s the essence upon which they’re united. If the struggle and
the demand first unify people who aren’t unified, then the next step is
to destroy the basis of that unity in a way that allows for a new unity
unpoisoned by the centrality of the capital-relation. In other words,
one destroys what the demand unifies, our abstract identity, the unity
of a class, the unity of an identity. “The process of revolution is that
of the abolition of what is self-organisable.” (Theorie Communiste). The
conditions for a real unification will arise through the overcoming of
this negative form of community, a form born through the demand
struggle, and carried beyond it by the demandless one.
Communism or anarchy is the abolition of relations of capital in life
through the rupture with the rupture that reveals them — this second
rupture is determinate, a new configuration of which we can only speak
in the language of potentiality: activity without work, life without
value, people without things, time without measure, social without
society. “From struggles over immediate demands to revolution, there can
only be a rupture, a qualitative leap. But this rupture isn’t a
miracle.” (TC) It is a demand upon us.
[1] With the exception of the Detroit riot of June 20–22, 1943, the last
of the classic Jim Crow riots, which was predominantly whites attacking
blacks (killing 25) and blacks defending themselves (killing 9)
[2] We put “race riot” in quotes because every race riot is a class
riot, and we only label them “race riots” to distinguish them from the
earlier class riots of the century. For a practical analysis of a
supposed “race riot” where this is the case, see the article “LA ‘92:
The Context of a Proletarian Uprising” in the first issue of the journal
Aufheben.
[3] For example, on December 1^(st) 1906, 250 masked men rode into
Princeton, Kentucky, occupied the town for two hours and dynamited two
factories operated by Tobacco Trust, destroying 400,000 pounds of
tobacco.